Trump Ratchets Up Threats on the Media
(Trump threatens the specific protections found in the "First Amendment to the US Constitution)
Presidents are not all-powerful, but, if elected, Donald Trump would have some influence with the federal regulators who oversee major television networks.
Threatening the news media is nothing new for former President Donald J. Trump. He has accused major news outlets of defamation, blocked journalists from rallies and White House events, goaded followers into profane chants about CNN and popularized the term “fake news,” now embraced by autocrats around the world.
Even by those standards, though, his latest anti-media obsession — stripping television networks of their ability to broadcast the news because of coverage he doesn’t like — stands out.
“CBS should lose its license,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform last week. “60 Minutes should be immediately taken off the air.” He has repeated his demands in speeches and in interviews, echoing his earlier calls for ABC’s license to be “terminated” because of his displeasure with how the network handled his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.
On Sunday, Mr. Trump ratcheted up his threats against CBS. “We’re going to subpoena their records,” he told Fox News in an interview, repeating his claim that the network’s edit of Ms. Harris’s recent appearance on “60 Minutes” was misleading. Asked if revoking a broadcast license was a “drastic punishment,” Mr. Trump did not answer directly, instead lobbing a string of insults at Ms. Harris, whom he called “incompetent” and “a Marxist.”
During the “60 Minutes” interview, which aired on Oct. 7, Ms. Harris was asked about the war in the Middle East. In an early excerpt released by CBS a day before, Ms. Harris gave one lengthy answer; in the episode itself, Ms. Harris appeared to give a different, pithier reply.
Mr. Trump — who got into a tiff with CBS ahead of the “60 Minutes” episode, and declined to sit for an interview of his own — quickly seized on the editing as evidence of pro-Harris bias. “60 Minutes” said on Sunday that the “two” answers were merely taken from different sections of Ms. Harris’s full response to the question, and that Mr. Trump’s accusation of deceitful editing “is false.”
CBS’s editing was perceived by rival executives as clumsy, but still well within standard journalistic practice for TV news, and media experts have dismissed Mr. Trump’s claim as preposterous. But one member of the Federal Communications Commission, the regulatory agency that oversees broadcasters, has already expressed receptivity to the notion that CBS’s handling of the interview may have breached federal rules.
“Interesting. 🤔 Big if true,” the commissioner, Nathan Simington, wrote on X. Mr. Trump later shared a screenshot of Mr. Simington’s post on Truth Social.
Broadcast networks like ABC, CBS and NBC do not actually need a license to produce or publish news content. But the local affiliate stations that carry their broadcasts do require licenses. Those licenses are overseen by the F.C.C., which is independent from the White House.
A president cannot unilaterally revoke a license, but the president appoints members to the five-person commission. Mr. Simington is one of two current Republican members of the F.C.C. appointed by Mr. Trump. The other is Brendan Carr, who has shown a fondness for Elon Musk, one of Mr. Trump’s loudest champions and the owner of X, which happens to be the one major social media platform that the former president has not denigrated in recent weeks.
Mr. Simington and Mr. Carr, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday, could remain in their roles if Mr. Trump takes office. If the U.S. Senate returns to Republican control, the body would probably approve whomever Mr. Trump chooses for the F.C.C. And with a 3-2 majority, Mr. Trump’s F.C.C. appointees could theoretically vote to revoke whichever licenses they please.
Such a scenario requires several variables to fall Mr. Trump’s way, foremost of which would be securing victory over Ms. Harris in November. It would also require the commission to ignore decades of precedent and effectively reject longstanding norms that guarantee protections for media organizations.
Still, the fact that a feasible, if narrow, path exists for Mr. Trump’s proposed crackdown speaks to the permeability of federal protections for the news media — and the obscure levers in the byzantine regulatory machine that an emboldened president may reach for in a moment of pique.
“These threats against free speech are serious and should not be ignored,” Jessica Rosenworcel, the current chairwoman of the F.C.C., said in a statement. “The F.C.C. does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”
Tom Wheeler, the Democratic chairman of the F.C.C. from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that Mr. Trump’s threats could create a “chilling effect” on how news organizations make editorial calls.
“It is hard to yank a license; it is particularly hard to yank a license on the instruction of the president of the United States,” Mr. Wheeler said. “But it is not hard to have an impact on decision making.”
“I don’t envy the role of a Trump chairman of the F.C.C.,” Mr. Wheeler added.
If Mr. Trump were elected again, his Justice Department would also have oversight of significant corporate media transactions.
On the campaign trail in 2016, Mr. Trump pledged to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, the owner of CNN, a network whose coverage he frequently railed against. When he was president, the antitrust division of the Justice Department sued to block the deal, although the government ultimately lost the case at trial.
In recent years, Mr. Trump has frequently criticized Comcast, the parent company of NBCUniversal and MSNBC, and called out its chief executive, Brian Roberts, over NBC’s news coverage. Comcast has long been rumored to be considering a merger or spinoff of NBCUniversal, although nothing has been announced.
Because of his penchant to exaggerate, and his history of employing rhetoric that does not always line up with his actions, it is difficult to parse exactly how Mr. Trump would handle these issues if he retook the White House.
For all Mr. Trump’s bark, American networks and news organizations emerged relatively intact from his presidency. The news outlet that arguably suffered the steepest consequence was Fox News, which paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit stemming from Mr. Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.
Last week, Mr. Trump extended his media criticism to Fox News, which is home to several of his most loyal pundits. He attacked the network for airing too many “Radical Left Lunatics,” and said he planned to meet with Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, to demand that Fox News stop running “negative commercials” about his campaign.
None of that prevented Mr. Trump from sitting for an interview that aired on Sunday with the Fox News host Howard Kurtz. In that conversation, Mr. Trump called The New York Times “corrupt” and suggested, in vague language, that he was “probably going to sue them at some point very soon.” He did not provide an example of the coverage that bothered him.
Even Mr. Trump’s threats about broadcast licenses are not new. In 2017, he floated the ideaof stripping NBC of its licenses after its news division reported a story about nuclear weapons that displeased him.
At the time, Mr. Trump was rebuked by the then-chairman of the F.C.C., Ajit V. Pai, who said the agency “does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast,” adding, “The F.C.C., under my leadership, will stand for the First Amendment.”
In that instance, Mr. Trump took no further action. Mr. Pai, a Republican first appointed to the commission by Barack Obama, served for the remainder of Mr. Trump’s term.
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016. More about Michael M. Grynbaum
David McCabe is a Times reporter who covers the complex legal and policy issues created by the digital economy and new technologies. More about David McCabe
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